Antonia Murphy is a writer of great charm and appeal. She's kind of impossible to resist.

—ELIZABETH GILBERT (Yes THAT Elizabeth Gilbert!), New York Times bestselling author of The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love

Dirty Chick perfectly captures the chaotic balance of hilarity, hardship, triumph, tragedy, romance, pornography and general grossness that makes up farm life. In this crowded world of hipster farmers, Antonia Murphy proves herself to be the real thing.

—JOSH KILMER PURCELL, bestselling author of I Am Not myself These Days and The Bucolic Plague, star of The Fabulous Beekman Boys

Dirty Chick has it ALL. And by all I mean home made booze, arson, a heavy hand of insanity and a magic place called Love Mountain. It's the dirtiest, most delightful book I've ever read. I fucking loved it, laughed my ass off and got so grossed out I couldn't wait to go back and visit Antonia and her very brave family on her raucous New Zealand farm. Dirty Chick will love you long time.

—LAURIE NOTARO, New York Times best-selling author of The Idiot Girls Action Adventure Club and The Potty Mouth at the Table

Just when I thought motherhood was the toughest challenge there is, along comes Antonia Murphy, doing the Mommy thing with goats, cows and freaking alpacas. Her hilarious exploits with chickens, lambs and a single amorous rooster make me grateful there's no goat colostrum in my sippy cup. Trigger warning: DIRTY CHICK might make you laugh out loud. Proceed with care.

—STEFANIE WILDER-TAYLOR, bestselling author of Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnayand Gummi Bears Should Not Be Organic

Way down under in the land of hobbits, a family of transplanted Californians do battle with monsters worse than mere dragons – lusty goats, a crazed rooster, and alpacas that spit green gobs of goo. Nearly every page of Antonia Murphy’s big, boisterous, hilarious tale of how not to start a farm in New Zealand bristles with jaw-droppingly outrageous livestock encounters and visceral details that would have made Rabelais blush. Wallowing in this filthy, funny, and unexpectedly sweet tale of self-inflected misery is the perfect cure for the next time you’re feeling too sorry for yourself.

–BOB TARTE, author of Enslaved by Ducks and Kitty Cornered

You go girl, rabbit ears and all, this book is raw, rugged and alive in a personal, humanistic way. Antonia shares life as it is, not as it 'should be'. Filled with sass, love, high energy, foibles and the delicious power of a rich and supportive community. This is a great read for any DIY 'farmer, wanna be', and anyone who wants to take a peek at how dreams and reality blur when you actually take the risk to jump into your passion full speed ahead. Three cheers and a big cloacal kiss for Antonia, may all your cheeses bloom, without poil de chat!

In sparkling prose, Antonia Murphy takes us along on one family’s foray into the world of small farming. By turns entertaining and heart wrenching, her story is so captivating that I neglected my own chores and children to follow hers on their wild ride. Farming and parenting are both dirty work—exhausting, satisfying, rich with all kinds of meaning—and Murphy captures life in all its gory and glorious complication. Dirty Chick is an exceptional story of Murphy and her crew finding their place in the world.

—MARGARET HATHAWAY, author of The Year of the Goat and Living With Goats

KIRKUS REVIEW

An “artsy San Francisco dilettante” tells the story of how she traded her urban existence for a life of “chasing cows…and executing chickens” in rural New Zealand.

In 2004, Murphy and her husband decided to move abroad to New Zealand, where Murphy gave birth to a developmentally delayed son named Silas and, later, a little “savage” of a daughter named Miranda. When it came time for Silas to start his education, the family moved to Purua, a tiny community that was home to a school where “no one would judge [him]” for being different.

American bohemians with romantic visions of country living, they took up residence on a rented farm. Strange accents, Murphy’s own peculiar habit of wearing Halloween animal ears, and lack of knowledge regarding what it really took to raise livestock and grow their own food soon made the Murphys the object of curiosity and scorn.

The arrival of a farm-savvy niece from New York proved the family's salvation. She helped the Murphys persevere through misadventures involving baby calves with long, black tongues, alpacas that looked like teddy bears but behaved atrociously, sheep that required “ovine Brazilian[s]” and a dog that ate feces.

Stripped of their initial illusions, Murphy and her husband learned that “[r]eal country life…involved blood, shit, and worms.” But it also involved simple yet profound pleasures, such as consuming their homemade artisanal wines and cheeses with the colorful group of expatriates and locals who eventually became family friends.

Murphy’s book presents an unsentimental, at times unapologetically graphic, treatment of farm life. At the same time, it offers a comic yet thoroughly wise perspective on what it means to start over in a new country and live close to a natural world that is anything butromantic.